The Football Planning Tool: planning forms that buyers and other reps picked up

What it is

Khounlavong sold to two sporting goods chains, MC Sports and Dunham's, from Detroit. His stated method was fact based selling, which he defined as presenting with retail performance.

His 2007 portfolio deck lists three planning tools he developed to lead the business: the stock to sales plan, the anniversary form and the category planning tool. The anniversary form was issued each season and used to set category targets. The Football Planning Tool, dated September 2006, is the one that survives with its instructions.

What Khounlavong did

• Wrote the Football Planning Tool and a guide to it. The guide opens with why to use it: the tool "was designed to enable the rep to sell by using quantitative information."
• Built the tool to plan a whole category across multiple seasons, manage the retailer's product flow, show how Nike was performing for the retailer, and manage the retailer's profitability by showing the season's initial markup as a result of its bookings.
• Gave the rep a snapshot on one form: last year's bookings against this year's plan in units and dollars, average price per unit, and units per door.
• Set out the steps for a rep to follow: enter the account's discounts, paste last year's assortment from rep reports, enter last year's units by delivery, enter retail performance, build the new assortment, tier it by door level, and add competitive information.
• Kept the MC Sports football business plan for summer and fall 2007 in the same format, with dollar targets for 5%, 15% and 20% growth and a sheet for competitive information. A blank copy of the plan sits in the same folder.
• Worked with Nike's business planning team in fiscal 2005 to streamline the seasonal planning process: anniversary forms, assortment plans and whiteboards.
• Completed and issued a new anniversary form for every season in fiscal 2007. In fiscal 2008 the forms were built by category across footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories for his top two accounts.
• Helped a colleague create a soccer version of the anniversary form.
• Developed the Central Region Leadership Meeting prep input document in fiscal 2009. It gave category managers and presenters the forecast against last year, the retail landscape, marketplace risks, key anniversary styles, the competition and the gaps.

Results

• The Dunham's footwear buyers consistently used the anniversary form to make their plans.
• His fiscal 2009 review records that the form made scenario plans more precise.
• Replenishment forecast accuracy was 84% in fiscal 2008 against a goal of 80%, and 97.2% in fiscal 2009.
• The integrated football presentation to MC Sports, in a deck of February 2008, shows football footwear up 9.6% in units and 10.2% in dollars.
• His 2007 resume says he contributed to the development of seasonal assortment planning tools. His resumes from 2010 say he drove their adoption.

At a glance